English Majors: I want to study English but I want to know what it is that you learn in College

I'm currently taking a small selection of courses at a college in order to decide what I want to major in. I really wanted to major in English but my English course is really discouraging me.

The entire course has been an examination of gender roles within several different fictional texts with a brief stop for the professor to attack capitalism and promote Marxism using one of the novels. And it's a general introductory English course, not a gender roles course.

I don't necessarily disagree with the politics but is this all that an English Major program will be? I'm bored already. If I major in English will I just spend four years hearing about gender roles, sexuality, and left political/economic ideologies?

That's definitely a big trend in US universities today. In general there are lots of ways of looking at literature and if you don't like the perspective of gender studies / or, for example, post-colonialism, then you would have to try to find a college whose English department does not concentrate on these issues, or at least find those few professors/lecturers who have points of view that you find attractive. I studied comp lit. My undergrad involved a lot of the stuff you were mentioning. Grad school I focused mostly on the relationship between literature and science.

No, and I think that if you think about it, they're not necessarily promoting a political/social viewpoint. It's more like, they need some kind of perspective to ANALYZE literature, and some of those you have named are popular perspectives.

Could be that that's what he's doing. I felt the same way in some of my undergrad classes. In general, literature professors should be trying to teach you about literature, not convince you of any political or philosophical positions. That means that he is most likely just arguing that the books can be better understood and discussed in terms of the ideas he's talking about in class. If you take another couple lit classes, and don't like them, I would consider changing majors.